Male pelvic multi-organ segmentation aided by CBCT-based synthetic MRI

To develop an automated cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) multi-organ segmentation method for potential CBCT-guided adaptive radiation therapy workflow. The proposed method combines the deep leaning-based image synthesis method, which generates magnetic resonance images (MRIs) with superior soft-tissue contrast from on-board setup CBCT images to aid CBCT segmentation, with a deep attention strategy, which focuses on learning discriminative features for differentiating organ margins. The whole segmentation method consists of 3 major steps. First, a cycle-consistent adversarial network (CycleGAN) was used to estimate a synthetic MRI (sMRI) from CBCT images. Second, a deep attention network was trained based on sMRI and its corresponding manual contours. Third, the segmented contours for a query patient was obtained by feeding the patient's CBCT images into the trained sMRI estimation and segmentation model. In our retrospective study, we included 100 prostate cancer patients, each of whom has CBCT acquired with prostate, bladder and rectum contoured by physicians with MRI guidance as ground truth. We trained and tested our model with separate datasets among these patients. The resulting segmentations were compared with physicians' manual contours. The Dice similarity coefficient and mean surface distance indices between our segmented and physicians' manual contours (bladder, prostate, and rectum) were 0.95  ±  0.02, 0.44  ±  0.22 mm, 0.86  ±  0.06, 0.73  ±  0.37 mm, and 0.91  ±  0.04, 0.72  ±  0.65 mm, respectively. We have proposed a novel CBCT-only pelvic multi-organ segmentation strategy using CBCT-based sMRI and validated its accuracy against manual contours. This technique could provide accurate organ volume for treatment planning without requiring MR images acquisition, greatly facilitating routine clinical workflow.